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Saturday, October 31, 2009

Paleontologists are beginning to re-analyze many dinosaurs and reclassify them as different growth stages of the same previously named species, a move that may eliminate as many as one third of all known dinosaur species.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

NASA's Swift satellite has detected a violent gamma-ray burst, named GRB 090423, from the collapse of a massive star some 13 billion light-years away, making it the oldest and most distant object ever recorded.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

A new study demonstrates that common elevated mammalian body temperatures (37°C in humans) hinders the growth of most fungal strains, lending a new theory for the rise of mammals as the dominant species after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Instruments aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed the relative shape of the heliosphere to be almost spherical instead of the predicted comet-shaped as it moves through the interstellar medium, forcing revisions of decades-old theoretical models.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Data from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has produced a sky map at the edge of our heliosphere, revealing a bright ribbon of detail or emissions not previously detected by either of the Voyager probes and not consistent with any current theory of this boundary with the local interstellar medium.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

During a rare brain surgery to relieve seizures, researchers used intra-cranial electrophysiology (ICE) to gain significant insight into Broca's area and how the brain processes grammar and produces words.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Scientists have found evidence of an impact crater in the Shiva basin off the western coast of India that is four times as large as that beneath the Yucatan Peninsula, leading to speculation that this may have been the asteroid impact leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Paleontologists in northeast China have discovered fossils of a new flying dinosaur, named Darwinopterus, possessing features of both primitive and advanced flying reptiles and that may fill in a gap between earlier and older pterosaurs.

Monday, October 12, 2009

A spider with a nearly completely herbivorous diet, the Bagheera kiplingi, has been discovered in the jungles of Central America and Mexico, making it unique among the known 40,000 carnivorous spider species.

Friday, October 9, 2009

NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) smashed a bus-sized spacecraft into a crater near the Moon's south pole in a planned experiment to examine the debris for traces of subsurface water.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered a large, faint ring of ice and dust surrounding Saturn millions of miles out from the planet and is believed to be the early stages of another ring formation.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

A new earliest human ancestor has been found in Ethiopia, a 4.4 million-year-old hominid fossil nicknamed "Ardi" (Ardipithecus ramidus) that is 1 million years older than "Lucy" (Australopithecus afarensis), providing evidence humans and apes shared an even earlier common ancestor.